Vivat Libertas

Well, this is going a bit overboard... And here I go...Me, the failure at romance and life, discussing a subject everyone pretends to know about but I'd wager few have got right! Yes, that's it! You can love it, you can hate it, but you're force-fed it from birth...That old, tired concept we call romance, that goes hand in hand with another old and tired concept we call love. I'd like to start by ranting a little bit about love and by saying this: If we as a society had never heard of love, I think that fewer of us would fall in love and those that did would be even more confused (I can't speak for everyone, but I tend to get confused as shit by things other people seem to do with ease and then not get that confused at all by things that other people shy away from). But I also think we'd have a lot less of people saying "this isn't real  love", and who knows? Maybe if we weren't force-fed love and romance we'd have better relationship...

This is a very big trigger warning for suicide. Now that I've warned you, read on at your own risk. I really hate to do yet another suicide post, but it's come to my attention that people still need educating about it despite the amount of information out there. Hopefully this will just be short and sweet. Suicide is selfish.   Not true. People who kill themselves aren't selfish, they cannot bear life and have heavy burdens to carry (whether external or internal). I would argue that it's more  selfish to try and keep them alive without respecting them and trying to help them. Contemplating suicide is weak; people who kill themselves are weak.  Untrue. Firstly, the claim that contemplating suicide is weak is the claim that thinking about a certain action shows weakness, and how does that make sense?! Not to mention taking your own life is much, much harder than it looks due to little things like self-preservation, and that people don't normally kill themselves...

Right, this is a subject I can actually talk about without looking like an idiot! At least, it's a subject I think  I can talk about without looking like an idiot...did a bit of theory, I sing a bit (passed my Grade 7 with distinction not too long ago) and I listen to a lot of music. Recently, while walking across Hampstead Heath, Linden Lea  (an art song by Ralph Vaughan Williams) popped into my head and I haven't been able to get it out of there since. So, being me, I went to look for it on youtube...and promptly ran into Sturgeon's Law in action. I don't think I've found a single solo version that I liked. (Hell, I even tried to sing it myself to get the general gist, but my voice is absolutely horrible so that failed.) You see, Linden Lea  is perhaps not the easiest of songs - finding a decent place to breathe is a bit difficult, for a start - but it's also not one that requires many fancy tricks or vocal shiny, which is what I see in a fair few of the rec...

Not so long ago I went to Cecil Court  with my mother and grandmother for a half-day trip (feeling a bit miserable and sick for various reasons, not least the stupidity and superficiality I see around me - I'm an oversensitive and profoundly whiny soul), having been told that it was a street full of books. Since I devour just about anything in print, I was rather looking forward to going there. Although I had some niggling reservations after looking it up - it seemed to be a street for people who collected books rather than people who read them, like me - and although as the day wore on I became less and less partial to staying in London, I went anyway and set off with a spring in my step, my relatives trailing behind me, to see books. As things turned out, I was sorely disappointed. The shops were small and of no benefit to anyone save perhaps rich collectors; apart from maybe two or three shops, their collections of books weren't very good - there was little for someone...

So there's apparently been a bit of a flurry over Atheism Plus - which is, depending on how you want to define it, humanism, a new religion, a bit of idiocy, or atheism plus social justice/not being a dick. Some people are coming out in favour of it; some, including a fair few of the Twitter atheists I follow (though I could just be mistaking being vocal with actual numbers - I've not seriously tried to tot up any statistics, being a lazy shit), are opposed to it. I suppose it wouldn't be fair of me to launch into my opinion without first trying to provide a definition of Atheism Plus, so here's Jen McCreight , who appears to have launched the whole thing, in her own words: " We are… Atheists  plus  we care about social justice, Atheists  plus  we support women’s rights, Atheists  plus  we protest racism, Atheists  plus  we fight homophobia and transphobia, Atheists  plus  we use critical thinking and skepticism. " As some peo...

Giant trigger warning for sexual harassment/stalking. This world pisses me off most of the time, it really does. This is one of many reasons why. Not so long ago I was making the journey to my local tube station that I regularly make, dressed in black sandals, a red cardigan, black leggings and a white sleeveless top. (Once you've stopped laughing at my total lack of fashion sense, please forgive me my description of my clothes. It does turn out to be vaguely relevant.) It was just after ten in the morning on a Monday, and to get there I had to pass through a wonderfully pretentious upper-middle-class area. I'm not totally innocent; I've been sexually harassed before and I've been harassed on the street by men yelling at me about my smile. But what happened next - though it was mild and I know that it happens - did shock me, since it was my first experience with strangers doing this to me. (I've had people I know do the same, mostly to bully me.) There w...

Not so long ago, I popped out to Hampstead for half a day to get away from the confines of my house and get some peace and quiet...in Hampstead Heath. I really don't know what I was thinking. (I did manage to spend two hours sitting quietly on a stump reading Plato and Chekhov, though.) Before that, though, I had to walk down Hampstead High Street, studiously avoiding many an overpriced shop, and I still  couldn't resist the temptation of turning into Flask Walk and having a look around Keith Fawkes, arguably one of my favourite shops. It's a bookshop, for a start, and I can't resist bookshops - I literally can't. Put me near a bookshop and I'm almost guaranteed to wander in, then come back out carrying armfuls of books and being very short of cash. It's also a second-hand bookshop - even better! As I write this, I have a copy of some of Chekhov's short stories sitting next to me from that same Keith Fawkes, and it has that charming smell of ageing...

So atheism and happiness seems to be bouncing around, as ever, around atheist circles on the internet as to who's happier: atheists or theists? (As far as I'm aware agnostics get marginalised at times; for reasons I'll go into later, the argument doesn't interest me that much.) People put forth study after study, shiny graph after shiny graph, hell, they even whip out some anecdotal evidence if they're feeling a bit lazy. And the flamewars, they burn...They very quickly seem to degenerate into personal attacks and essentially seem to run on stupid. Call me an idealist, but I expected better from people. After seeing people fuck up so much, I still expected better from them. I'm an idiot. But I digress. All these arguments hinge on the idea that whether atheists or theists are happier actually matters to whether atheism or theism is right, which - as the quote in the picture helps to illustrate, and as common sense should show - simply isn't true. Hap...

Why? One of the smallest, most dangerous and most irritating words in the English language, I find, it signals curiosity - no, more than that, it signals questioning. It signals not taking things at face value. It signals not wanting to accept things just because you've been told that's the way they are. It signals the desire to find out. And for that reason I'm coming to love the word "why?" even more than I did when I was a child first learning about things that made up the universe, even though we couldn't see them , and why the sky was blue . It's also a very useful word to use when questioning people's beliefs, and one that tends to reveal a fair bit about the people and beliefs one's questioning. Maybe it's just my misanthropy or the circles I move in, but I tend to find that not very far into the questioning people stop being able to back up the notions they're propounding, instead resorting to circular reasoning , telling me I...

So I've been thinking again...This is a dangerous thing, you know. It disturbs people. Then again, they don't have  to read my thoughts, so they can go away in peace, I can rant in peace and thus conflict is avoided. And as you can quite obviously see, I've been thinking about feminism and humour - to be more precise, the stereotype of the humourless feminist. Other people have written about it before, and better and more eloquently than I could ever manage, being as I am just a young woman with little knowledge of feminist history or theory, but I intend to offer my own perspective on it. I don't think feminists are inherently humourless - in fact, I know they're not. Fuck, I don't move in many feminist circles and the feminists I know are (for the most part) snarky, funny people who know how to laugh. Some are graver than others. That's fine by me - it's not a crime to be a serious person, especially when it comes to standing up against a kyriarc...